[whatwg] 2.2 Performant

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> "In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are 
> intended to be easy to follow, and not intended to be performant."
> 
> Yech. The recently coined word "performant" just grates on my ears; and 
> I'm not the only one as a Google search will show: 
> http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=performant

It's language evolution at work:

   http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/performant


> Perhaps we could replace it with "efficient" or some other word or 
> phrase?

"Efficient" is more about efficient use of resources rather than about the 
performance of the solution. A solution might be very efficient but very 
slow. I guess we could use "fast", but it seems rather pessimistic to call 
even the most naive implementation of the algorithms in the spec "slow", 
given that we're talking about performing millions of operations per 
second here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'